FAIRY TALES

This is one of the very best albums of all time and in my personal top three. Vocalist Gilli Smyth, she of the space whisper from Gong, tells three fairy tales, and the band supplies the necessary moods to these tales with their music. Everything about it is just right - the way Gilly Smyth tells the tales, the way the band follows every twist of the tales and makes the images appear before your eyes, and above all an almost supernatural Didier Malherbe on flutes and saxes. Whether he illustrates the tunes the Pied Piper plays on his flute (you would have followed him too!), imitates the sounds of rats, lets a frog croak, dogs bark, or sends Wassilissa flying over a landscape - he is always perfect. Not that the rest of the band are slouches, but Didier Malherbe just outshines them all. Oh, and this album is also the very best if you want to get your little kids interested in prog. It is the favorite album of our kids Dorothy and Alice (both age 5). Don't hesitate, buy it now!

Well, not much I could add to BaldJean's excellent review, just left to say: A very exceptional record! Three fairy tales with some nice educational messages accompanied with high-class Canterbury style music blending perfectly jazz, rock, folk and classical music. The music fits very well and emphasizes the told stories. Really just awesome and both the concept and the composition of the music to fit perfectly to the tales are really well-done. I've to agree that Didier Malherbe shines absolutely over the rest of musicians although those are definitely excellent as well. The only tiny critisism I'm able to put is in fact that the voice of evil Baba Yaga sounds a tap too much hilarious but that's really marginal.

A definite must-have for everybody loving this kind of music AND fairy tales, and suitable for BOTH kids and grown-ups! A real MASTERPIECE - and this did not happen often during the end of the seventies!

This album is unlike anything i've ever heard before in my life. Gilli Smyth from GONG and Harry Williamson have created something very special here.Three Fairy Tales are told with samples, affects and most importantly with some incredible music. Nik Turner (HAWKWIND) plays aboe, Didier Mahlerbe (GONG) adds woodwinds and reeds, Eduardo Niebla (ATILA) guitar plus there are many other guests. It's difficult to describe what's going on here because I won't do it justice. Gilli is simply perfect as the narrator for these three stories. And while I pretend to be an adult I am completely taken in by these stories. Who doesn't love hearing a good story right ? And as I mentioned the music is fantastic as we get guitars, drums, uilleann pipes, woodwinds, bass, harp and keyboards. Everything is done so extremely well i'm a little bit at a loss to know what to say here. I just wish I had this when my kids were younger, but you know what I still think they'd like this.

This is a one of kind album in my collection that is done perfectly.

Mother Gong - Gilli Smyth's own branch of the extended Gong family - started off humbly, offering up this triptych of fairy tales narrated by Gilli as a range of Gong and Hawkwind alumni jam away in the background in a broadly thematically and tonally appropriately manner. It's decent enough for what it is, though what it is is a collection of children's stories set to psychedelic music, and in some respects the formula trips itself up - the music distracts from the stories and at points overwhelms Gilli's narration, whilst Gilli's narration often obscures some of the more interesting things the band are doing.

Spoken fairy tales with musical accompaniment: Isn't this the perfect match for progressive rock artists? I think so! The music created to support Gilli's accomplished and very professional rendering of three fairy tales is the best Gong music I've ever heard! The recording and engineering is almost perfect, with only a few issues between the voice track levels and those of the instruments, otherwise this is just a delightful album of melodies, musicianship, and creativity, with the bonus that it's all in support of these wonderful, meaningful stories.

1. "Wassalisa" (22:28) is musically my favorite thing Gong (in any of its incarnations and offsprings) has ever done. It's just mesmerizing! While Gilli's story is wonderful and theatric, there are times when the vocal track is mixed too low (or Gilli's voice modulates into lower volumes) so that her story gets lost in the music. This is acceptable mostly because the music is SO amazing, so engaging. In my third listen through I'm still having a terrible time trying to focus on the story because I am so in love with the music. It's like listening to Anthony Phillips' "Geese and the Ghost" for the first time (only with better sound production). Didier Malherbe is wonderful, but then so are the rest of the musicians. Great art! (9.5/10)

2. "The Three Tongues" (12:43) is a nice story with a good moral that is much better mixed with its musical accompaniment. The music here draws quite a bit from classical traditions with many sections featuring single instruments carrying the melody or weight of the theatric support--classical guitar, piano, steel-stringed guitars, oboe, Uilleann pipes, harp, keyboards, and, of course, plenty of woodwinds. The theatric incidentals used for sound effects and accents (including crowd noises) are amazing and add a great deal to the rendering. (10/10)

3. "The Pied Piper" (14:38) is sonically the most well-balanced song as well as the most confidently rendered story from the storyteller. The GENTLE GIANT/GRYPHON/circus-like music is my least favorite, least engaging, but is perfectly performed and makes the best theatric companion to Gilli's story. (Could they be partially improvised?) How much fun these professionals must have had making this album! (9.5/10)

Whether this music and album were created as a vehicle for children stories or Wagnerian-like operas, this is brilliant, masterful music; an album to hear, to fall in love with.

The matriarchal branch on the Gong family tree, MOTHER GONG may have been just one of a multitude of Gong side projects that emerged from Daevid Allen's fertile musical playing grounds but clearly must stand out as one of the strangest of the lot. Led by progressive rock's only space whisper extraordinaire Gillian Mary "Gilli" Smyth whose sensual siren-like cosmic callings haunted the classic Gong years as she elevated the Canterbury jazz infused space rock to cosmic realities. Her presence was the perfect antidote to Daevid Allen's quirky whimsical approach and delivered the perfect divine feminine touch on an otherwise male-dominated scene.

The idea for MOTHER GONG was in the works as far back as 1974 when Smyth left the parent grouping but officially took form in 1978 after the release of Smyth's solo album "Mother" which gathered her political ideologies and poetic inclinations. The next step was yet another offshoot in the Gong universe called MOTHER GONG where this time Gilli steered the ship and took things into arenas never envisaged by Allen and his cohorts. The debut album FAIRY TALES arrived on the scene and found the unlikely pairing of symphonic prog, Canterbury jazz, folk music, Gong inspired space rock and children's FAIRY TALES of all things~! An oddball mix to be sure, FAIRY TALES featured three tales that were subdivided into seven or eight parts.

While most narrated in spoken word prose by Smyth, the backing music features an all-star lineup including Gong saxist Didier Malherbe, Hawkwind woodwind player Nick Turner and a host of other musicians offering various sounds including rock guitar, keyboards, bass guitar, percussion and ethnic touches such as the harp, muzma and Uilleann pipes. Broken up into three major tales: "Wassillissa," "The Three Tongues" and "The Pied Piper," the album features Smyth in story time hour with her own soundtrack of seasoned musicians wailing away in the background. A bizarre mishmash of styles that weave in and out of the background with varying effects while Smyth stoically reads to the audience as if we were in a grade school class.

Despite the oddball combo pack of prog rock and folk mixed with children's FAIRY TALES, Smyth found some interest in the weirdness of it all and toured with artists such as Bob Dylan and Big Brother and the Holding Company as well as recording audio books for children! Perhaps the most out of the box thinking performer in the entire history of progressive rock, Smyth continued the band with various lineups pretty much until her death in 2016 in one form or the other. This music is really hard to categorize as it sounds like nothing else. The music is more like a collage effect sounding more like the whacky spastic tendencies of Frank Zappa than anything in the Canterbury umbrella however there's that too!

Well, it's a novel idea for sure but one i'm not overly excited about as i tend to dislike spoken word poetry accompanied by music with a few exceptions such as Current 93's unique approach. Children's tales offer bizarre subject matter for a prog album but i guess everything should be tried at least once however the music doesn't seem to jive well with the storyline and the monotonous diction of Smyth seems to diminish the overall effect. I wish she would have offered some of these recitals in her classic space whisper mode or at least offered some more musical singing styles to break up the rather uniform presentation at hand. It's an OK album and one that deserves kudos for its brash experimental approach but like many excursions into the unknown doesn't necessarily work out as much as i had hoped. Personally i prefer the following "Robot Woman" to this one.